Really!? Have they actually made it impossible to dual boot? I just received my laptop today, and was looking to do the same thing. I really need to keep Windows on it for college and work training specific things.

Depends which VM and which host.
Windows runs quite quickly on a KVM Hypervisor.
Ubuntu is quite slow on my Virtualbox running on Windows, yet win8.1 is quite quick on VB on Ubuntu.
Running KVM as a bare metal hypervisor with 2 guests probably gives the best result.

Unfortunately win8.1 even struggles to dual boot with windows 7.
If you set up fast boot, it will corrupt a win7 partition trying to "fix" it when you reboot into 8..

Dual boot was never an ideal solution.
You could always run Ubuntu from a USB stick.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

Is it possible with new laptops these days to replace Windows 8 completely with a Linux installation, ie not bother about dual-booting? Since becoming aware of UEFI, secure boot etc I have gained the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the main aim is to prevent anything other than Windows booting so I’m assuming that overwriting Windows completely with Linux would also present problems.

Could I possibly ask what make of laptop you have, nelz? I have been considering buying a new laptop for some time - strictly for the purpose of running Linux alone, but have so far hesitated for fear of ending up with something which would not allow me to do this.

As you probably know, I am a long-time Windows user but I am afraid 8 leaves me cold. I have a copy on VirtualBox which I dip into from time to time but have not managed to sum up much enthusiasm for it. I would hate to spend £400/£500 or so on a new machine and then find all I can do with it is run 8.